Internet communications and network communications allow for meetings and conferences to be scheduled and conducted over networks such as the Internet. While networks such as the Internet may make conducting a communications session easier from a network perspective, the larger number of entities that may seek to establish meetings creates the possibility that a party seeking to establish a communications session may be unknown to the communications device which the party is seeking to use in establishing the communications session.
In addition, a user may want to establish a communications session using Emails to communicate with potential meeting participants. Thus, a conferencing system may be confronted with the technical problem of how to set up a meeting for a potential host who may be previously unknown to the conferencing system and may be seeking to use one or more Emails to set up a meeting to be conducted over the Internet or another communications network.
A variety of services exist that enable users to schedule and launch online meetings and phone conferences, including traditional web conferencing services like Cisco's WebEx and Citrix's GoToMeeting as well as newer, more consumer-oriented services like Google Hangouts and Skype.
Meeting service providers often require that the party seeking to establish a communications session and/or session participants hold accounts with the service provider before the service provider will proceed with setting up a meeting or other session. Thus, Internet based meeting services often require that the meeting host have an account with the service provider before launching or scheduling such group sessions.
In addition, enabling hosts to schedule or launch such sessions directly from within their calendars of choice typically requires that a service provider integrate its solution into each major calendar application, and that end users of its service—or often the end users' system administrators—install the plug-in that enables the integrated service.
These factors create significant barriers to user adoption of such group communication services and greatly constrain the growth of the conferencing industry.
Know approaches to establish communications sessions fail to address the communications centric problem of how and/or whether to establish a meeting for an entity which was previously unknown to the service provider and/or the service providers conferencing system but which may want to establish a communications session through the use of one or more Email messages.
To significantly broaden the adoption of group communication services, therefore, there is a need for improvements, which would allow a person or other entity, sometimes referred to as a host, to schedule and launch group (2 or more people) online and phone sessions without requiring that the host have an account with the service provider in advance of launching or scheduling the session. There is also the need for the ability to launch and/or schedule such sessions directly from within the user's calendar of choice without a requirement to install additional software.
In addition, the ability for a user to easily designate the desired type of group session (e.g. phone conference, online meeting, screen sharing, online presentation, etc.) could further enhance the user experience and would be desirable if it were possible.